Video indexing/retrieval has been more and more desirable due to the drastic increases of multimedia content. Content providers create huge amounts of video data everyday, and more and more personal videos or advertising media would also like to be shared in the Internet. How to manage the huge amounts of video content and search the most desirable video data is becoming much more important.
However, existing compressed video bit stream, e.g., H.261, H.263, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264, VC-1, can not support the function of fast video retrieval without decoding process. The decoding process usually needs entropy decoding, inverse quantization, inverse transform, and reconstruction, and therefore a lot of computational complexity is included during video search process.
On the other side, the existing video indexing/retrieval techniques, such as searching by text, and content based retrieval as studied by MPEG-7, all have some drawbacks. Text search by matching filenames, titles, or surrounding texts, can be very fast but frequently gives undesired results. MPEG-7 standard defines a variety of metadata which can support some degree of content based retrieval. However, MPEG-7 defines too many metadata so that it is too complex and too massive to be a real standard in practice. Meanwhile, MPEG-7 can not be used seamless with video coding schemes.